Installation view of Pohflepp's "Forever Future" at the Wind Tunnel Gallery in Pasedena

Artist Sascha Pohflepp's recent work "The Tsiolkovsky Trick," sourced from models of space rockets via Google's 3D Warehouse, visually embodies a particular understanding of techno-history. In his essay "Lagrangian Futures," Pohflepp explains that in 1903 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky "published a scientific article titled 'Investigation of outer
space rocket appliances,' in which he proved that a propelled object
could perform space flight if throughout the launch would shed parts of
itself." Later in the essay, Pohflepp expounds:

Technology, although shrouded in notions of logic, reason and profit, is
a largely narrative endeavor anyway. Futures have to be thought before
they can be built or sold and their thinking as visions, myths and also
plain lies provides what Norman M. Klein fittingly refers to as
“fantastic infrastructure.” It is hardly surprising then that both
Tsiolkovsky and [Jack] Parsons had a great interest in science fiction. Before
he published in scientific journals, Tsiolkovsky had been writing
fiction, only one year before his first influential theoretical article,
he had published a novel about space colonization titled “Dreams of the
Earth and Sky.”

The Tsiolkovsky Trick

Any attempt to construct a linear narrative of technological process
faces countless hurdles. In embodying this narrative, Pohflepp's reveals its inadequacy through simple scrolling. Tsiolkosky's trick, of course, is narrative itself. Just as past serves as prologue, so too does the imagined future.
Pohflepp's emphasis on the narrative impulse echoes an eternal critical
obsession. While dreams and science fictions undoubtedly form a
discursive basis for any potential future, the form of narrative itself
may conceal as much as it displays. Paul Ricoeur reminds us that the stakes here may be higher than
they appear: "Ultimately at stake in the case of the
structural identity of the narrative function as well as in that of the
truth
claim of every narrative work is the temporal character
of human experience.” Historian Hayden White
has pointed out that the desire for cohesive is expressed not only in a
desire to narrate, but also to "to give events an aspect of
narrativity." In other words, narrative serves not only as a gloss over
events, but is additionally injected into their very core. A certain
critical consciousness is sacrificed within the narrative form.

As Pohflepp's "Forever Future"
project illustrates, technological development is frequently the result
not merely of one piece of tech leading directly into the next, but of
numerous discarded futures that give way to one model of future
development. For that project, the artist created the fictional Robert
Walker, a straw man for unfulfilled technologies and their corresponding
futures. "What happens to technological visions when they do not come
true? Do
they just disappear or is there a place where they live on until they
eventually may be materialized? Or are there phantom futures
that might forever stay at a certain distance from us and can we even
feel nostalgia for them?"

Bruce Sterling provides some interesting examples: "Some media do, in fact, perish. Such
as: the phenakistoscope. The teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The
stereopticon. The Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight
spectacles. Morton Heilig's early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The
various species of magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that
once riddled the underground of Chicago." What will be the rockets that form the
counter-future of our space age? Before phantom futures can become the
basis for Steampunk-style nostalgia, they are forgotten and removed from
society's techno-narratives.